Debugging start-up Rookout closes $8m round led by Cisco

Rookout is planning to expand its services beyond debugging after raising $8m in fresh funding.

Data extraction and pipelining platform Rookout was originally set up to make debugging a lot less tedious. But yesterday morning (7 August), the start-up announced that it has raised $8m in funding and hopes to expand its services beyond its core offering.

The Series A round was led by Cisco Investments, alongside existing backers TLV Partners and Emerge.

Rookout will use this funding to cover additional observability use cases and languages on its platform, alongside its existing support for programming languages such as Java, Kotlin, NodeJS and Python. The company also announced that it would introduce a free tier option.

In a statement, the company said: “Since exiting stealth just over a year ago, Rookout’s code-level data collection has defined a new category of observability software that decouples data from code, making understanding and debugging code easier and massively faster.”

Rookout said that companies using its platform have seen observation times reduced from hours to a few seconds, which minimises the chore aspects of debugging and frees up time to focus on features.

Capabilities

Rookout’s founding team are low-level engineering experts who “know how painful it is to waste time and rely on other people just to get the data you need”, so the company has developed a solution to eliminate those bottlenecks.

Using non-breaking breakpoints, Rookout allows engineers to find the information they need and deliver it anywhere, in order to understand and advance their software.

CEO and co-founder Or Weis said: “The unique aspect of our technology is in the decoupling of data from code, which gives access to the app’s data layer without affecting the code layer. This new approach is changing both the way developers perceive their software and the way they interact with it.

“We started by highlighting relatively simple use cases for this capability, such as logging and debugging, but we’ve discovered in the past year that our customers have been finding completely new ways to use Rookout’s code-level data collection capabilities.

“We’re now focused on accommodating, supporting and enhancing the many varied uses of code-level observability and pipelining.”

Investors

Vice-president of Cisco Corporate Development and Cisco Investments, Rob Salvagno, said: “Developers have become key influencers of enterprise IT spend.

“By collecting data on demand without redeploying, Rookout created a developer-centric software, which short-circuits complexities in the production debugging, increases developer efficiency and reduces the friction which exists between IT ops and developers.

LaunchDarkly’s Kodumal also praised the start-up: “With Rookout, you never have to waste time deploying new code to get data from your old code. Everything is just available with a click. Once you decouple data from code, anything is possible.”

Since its launch in 2017, Rookout has opened two offices, one in San Francisco and one in Tel Aviv, with 20 employees spread between the two locations. To date, the company has raised $12m.